Umpteenth version of Mission Gateway gets a thumbs up from planning commission

What’s a Wal-Mart-anchored development worth to Mission taxpayers?

Does $29 million in public money sound like a deal for a development that starts with the world’s largest retailer — which already operates 20 other locations in the Kansas City area — along with a hotel, some apartments and maybe office space?

That’s the decision that the Mission City Council will face soon after that city’s planning commission approved on Monday the latest blueprint for Mission Gateway at Johnson Drive and Shawnee Mission Parkway.

We long ago ran out of enough fingers on both hands to count which version of Mission Gateway we’re on, but this one still includes a 150,000-square-foot Wal-Mart, accompanied by other retail buildings, an apartment building and perhaps office space if the development team can land a tenant.

It’s certainly less grandiose than most of Mission Gateway’s previous permutations, but it’s more robust than the ordinary strip mall that the property’s developer shopped around to a bemused public toward the end of 2014.

Planning commissions mull over a development’s technical aspects, such as whether it conforms with zoning and land-use policies. 

New York developer Tom Valenti now goes before the Mission City Council to ask for $29 million in public funds through tax-increment financing and a community-improvement district to bridge the financing gap in his current $145 million plan. The Kansas City Business Journal reports that Valenti will seek a community-improvement district that charges an extra 1 percent sales tax on most of the property, which will be earmarked to defray costs for his project. Wal-Mart will get a separate half-cent CID. 

Once upon a time, incentives like TIF were meant to cure blight and spur development where it would not otherwise occur. One could argue that the old Mission Mall site that Valenti acquired and tore down a decade ago is blighted, but that’s mostly because the developer has not accomplished much with the property since then.

But the 26 acres at the former mall site, flanked by major thoroughfares in Shawnee Mission Parkway, Johnson Drive and Roe Avenue, makes for a valuable and enticing piece of property. 

At least Valenti is no longer asking for general obligation bonds from Mission, which would put taxpayers on the hook if Mission Gateway didn’t drum up enough money on its own to satisfy bondholders. That means less risk for Mission officials to contemplate. But the biggest risk with Mission Gateway has always been whether the developer could actually pull it off. Counting on him to do so after so many versions of his property still add up to a dirt hill in Mission requires a leap of faith.